Yeah, right.
MARRIAGE AND DEMOCRACY: I live in a city which has the highest proportion of gay people and gay couples in the country, after San Francisco. The issue of marriage rights is obviously pertinent; and our elected officials tend to be for it. The social right has always argued that the people and their elected representatives should be able to decide these questions. So I look forward to their condemning a Kansas senator who is threatening to impose a ban on all our legal benefits and protections, if we dare to seek equality through the democratic process. The scandal of D.C. – a place with less democracy than Kirkuk – continues. But to have our lives and the internal workings of our own families dictated by a Kansan who would never win more than a handful of votes in this city is just maddening.
MORAL EQUIVALENCE WATCH: If you want to see how some of the most extreme theocons regard liberal democracy, read this paragraph:
In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There’s a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin. And if there’s no sense of sin, then there’s no need for a Redeemer, or for the Church.
A free society where people can listen to iPods and freely debate their own ideas of truth and the good life is all but indistinguishable from a Nuremberg rally? And we have no notion of sin? None? That’s just bizarre. We simply have a somehwat different idea of sin and immorality than the theocons. But from the theocon point of view, the glorious achievement of the secular West is as nihilistic and as dangerous as the Nazis. That is Benedict XVI’s view. I don’t think people have a clue how radical this man is. And how ferocious a culture war he is about to unleash.
The Dish 